Classical Archaeology

BLACKWELL STUDIES IN GLOBAL ARCHAEOLOGY

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Blackwell Studies in Global Archaeology is a series of contemporary texts, each care-fully designed to meet the needs of archaeology instructors and students seeking volumes that treat key regional and thematic areas of archaeological study. Each volume in the series, compiled by its own editor, includes 12-15 newly commis-sioned articles by top scholars within the volume’s thematic, regional, or temporal area of focus.

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1 Mesoamerican Archaeology: Theory and PracticeEdited by Julia A. Hendon and Rosemary A. Joyce

2 Andean ArchaeologyEdited by Helaine Silverman

3 African Archaeology: A Critical IntroductionEdited by Ann Brower Stahl

4 Archaeologies of the Middle East: Critical PerspectivesEdited by Susan Pollock and Reinhard Bernbeck

5 North American ArchaeologyEdited by Timothy R. Pauketat and Diana DiPaolo Loren

6 The Archaeology of Mediterranean PrehistoryEdited by Emma Blake and A. Bernard Knapp

7 Archaeology of AsiaEdited by Miriam T. Stark

8 Archaeology of Oceania: Australia and the Pacific IslandsEdited by Ian Lilley

9 Historical ArchaeologyEdited by Martin Hall and Stephen W. Silliman

10 Classical Archaeology, Second EditionEdited by Susan E. Alcock and Robin G. Osborne

11 Prehistoric EuropeEdited by Andrew Jones

12 Prehistoric BritainEdited by Joshua Pollard

13 Egyptian ArchaeologyEdited by Willeke Wendrich

14 Social BioarchaeologyEdited by Sabrina C. Agarwal and Bonnie A. Glencross

Classical Archaeology

Second Edition

Edited by

Susan E. Alcock and Robin Osborne

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

This second edition first published 2012© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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List of Figures ixNotes on Contributors xv

Introduction 1Robin Osborne and Susan E. Alcock

1 WhatisClassicalArchaeology? 11Introduction 11(a) GreekArchaeology 13

Anthony Snodgrass(b) RomanArchaeology 30

Martin Millett

2 DoingArchaeology in theClassicalLands 51Introduction 51(a) TheGreekWorld 53

Jack L. Davis(b) TheRomanWorld 71

Henry Hurst

3 HumanEcologyand theClassicalLandscape 91Introduction 91TheGreekandRomanWorlds 93Lin Foxhall, Martin Jones and Hamish Forbes

4 TheEssentialCountryside 122Introduction 122(a) TheGreekWorld 124

Susan E. Alcock

Contents

vi contents

(b) TheRomanWorld 144Nicola Terrenato

5 UrbanSpacesandCentralPlaces 168Introduction 168(a) TheGreekWorld 170

Tonio Hölscher(b) TheRomanWorld 187

Nicholas Purcell

6 HousingandHouseholds 207Introduction 207(a) TheGreekWorld 209

Lisa Nevett(b) TheRomanWorld 228

Bettina Bergmann

7 Cult andRitual 249Introduction 249(a) TheGreekWorld 251

Robin Osborne(b) TheRomanWorld 268

Christopher Smith

8 ThePersonal and thePolitical 293Introduction 293(a) TheGreekWorld 295

John F. Cherry(b) TheRomanWorld 316

Penelope J. E. Davies

9 TheCreationandExpressionof Identity 348Introduction 348(a) TheGreekWorld 350

Jonathan M. Hall(b) TheRomanWorld 368

Andrew Wallace-Hadrill

10 LinkingwithaWiderWorld 394Introduction 394(a) Greeksand“Barbarians” 396

Sarah P. Morris(b) Romansand“Barbarians” 415

Jane Webster

contents vii

11 APlace forArt? 439Introduction 439(a) Putting theArt intoArtifact 442

Caroline Vout(b) ClassicalArchaeologyand theContextsofArtHistory 468

Michael Squire

Prospective 501Susan E. Alcock and Robin Osborne

Index 506

List of Figures

1.1 Theheydayofthe“greatsanctuaryexcavation”:ArchaicsculpturesunearthedattheSanctuaryofArtemis,Corfu,1911 18

1.2 AdolfFurtwängler,1853–1907 201.3 SirJohnBeazley,1885–1970 211.4 TheheydayofGreektemplebuilding(so-called“Templeof

Concord”)atAkragasinSicily(ca.425B.C.) 241.5 SnakeColumndedicatedatDelphi,latertakentoConstantinople

(Istanbul) 321.6 LintelinscriptionfromCitâniadeBriteros,Portugal 421.7 Hallreconstruction,Shiptonthorpe,EastYorkshire 431.8 PlanofFaleriiNovi,basedontheresultsofgeophysicalsurvey 461.9 Portus,theportofimperialRomeatthemouthoftheTiberRiver 472.1 AerialviewofthepeninsularsiteofAyiaIriniontheislandof

KeosinGreece 552.2 LoringHall,residencehallfortheAmericanSchoolofClassical

StudiesatAthens 582.3 Densitiesofbrokenpiecesofancientandmedievalpotteryinthe

areasurveyedontheislandofKeos 622.4 PietdeJongreconstructionofCourt3atthePalaceofNestor 632.5 LinearBtabletsonthefloorofArchivesRoom8atthetimeof

excavationin1939 642.6 ViewoftheancientcityofApolloniainAlbaniaandofthe

medievalmonastery 662.7 Socialistmosaic“TheAlbanians”overentrancetoNational

MuseuminTirana 692.8 Politicsandarchaeology:aportraitofHannibalinfrontofa

reconstructionoftheCarthaginiannavalharboronaTunisianbanknote 75

x listof figures

2.9 TombstoneofasoldieroftheXXthlegion,foundatWotton,Gloucester 79

2.10 AreconstructedsacredlandscapeinRomanCarthageshowingtheslopesofaman-madehillsuggestedtohavebeendedicatedtothecultofCaelestis(CarthaginianTanit) 82

2.11 TopographycombiningarchaeologicalandtextualevidenceinRome.Fourdifferentviews(asin2002;someviewshavechangedsince)aboutthelocationoffourdocumentedelementsofancientRome 85

3.1 TerracedlandscapeinmodernMethana 1013.2 (a)BlackFigureSkyphosfeaturingBeampress,probablyfor

wine;(b)InstallationfortreadinggrapeslocatedintheMethanacountryside;(c)Reconstructionofanancientolivepress;(d)WinepressesfromtheimperialRomanvillaatSettefinestre,Toscana 103

3.3 Drygarden(xeriko bostani)forsummervegetablesinMethana,phototakeninthe1980s 107

3.4 TheVariHouse,Attica 1093.5 (a)ViewoftheRomansiteatMonsClaudianus,Egypt;

(b)RemainsofartichokefromtheRomansiteofMonsClaudianus;(c)RemainsofgarlicfromtheRomansiteofMonsPorphyrites 114

3.6 (a)Cross-cultivationwithawoodenardincontemporaryNepal;(b)Arecentmoldboardplow,withcuttingbladeor“coulter” 117

4.1 FieldwalkersinactionontheCycladicislandofKeos 1274.2 PlanoftheclassicalfarmhouseatLegrena:PalaiaKopraisia 1314.3 DistributionofsurveysitesdiscoveredintheSouthernArgolid.

Large,mediumandsmallsitesareshownascirclesofdifferentsizes;sitesofunknownsizeassquares;sitesofuncertaindateastriangles.(a)Archaic;(b)Classical;(c)LateClassical/EarlyHellenistic;(d)Hellenistic;(e)EarlyRoman;(f)LateRoman 136

4.4 ViewofthemarblequarriesatMountPenteli,Attica 1394.5 AnorewashingstationatThorikos,Attica,withthedemetheatre

behind 1404.6 ArchaicfarmsincentralItaly 1464.7 HellenisticfarmsinItaly 1484.8 TheAuditoriumsiteinthefifthcenturyB.C. 1514.9 TheVillaatPiazzaArmerinainthefifthcenturyA.D. 1554.10 ThecenturiationaroundtheViaAemiliainthePoPlain 1585.1 PlanoftheagoraareaofMegaraHyblaia 1765.2 PlanoftheclassicalagoraatAthens,asitwasca.500B.C. 1785.3 PlanoftheclassicalagoraatAthens,asitwasinthesecond

centuryB.C. 1795.4 PlasticodiRoma,showingtheCapitolabovetheForum 192

listof figures xi

5.5 AgenniusUrbicus’treatise,Illustration37 1945.6 Theallottedlandscapeoftheager Campanus 1955.7 Augustus’archatRimini 1975.8 RomeonthePeutingerTable 2026.1 (a)UnitIV.1,Nichoria;(b)Toumbabuilding,Lefkandi,Euboea;

(c)SkalaOropos,Attica,centralsector 2116.2 (a)Zagora,Andros,unitsH24/25/32,phase1(b)Zagora,Andros,

unitsH24/25/32,phase2 2156.3 NorthshoulderofAreopagosgroup 2176.4 (a)OlynthosAvii4;(b)OlynthosA3 2196.5 Pella,HouseofDionysos 2226.6 Delos,HouseoftheDolphins,phase2 2256.7 TerraceHouses,Ephesus.(a)ViewofperistyleofHouseII;

(b)Groundplanofterracehouses 2346.8 HouseoftheHunt,BullaRegia,Tunisia,fourthcenturyA.D. 2366.9 Watercolorreconstructionofapartmentblockatthefootofthe

CapitolineHill,Rome 2386.10 ModelofVillaPisanella,Boscoreale,MuseodellaCiviltàRomana,

1930 2407.1 Athenianred-figurebellkraterca.425B.C.,depictingasacrifice.

CatharinePagePerkinsFund95.25. 2537.2 Athenianred-figurestamnos,ca.450B.C.,showingwomen

engagedinritualactivityaroundamaskofthegodDionysos 256

7.3 DiagramofDoricandIonicorders. 2617.4 GoldandivorystatueidentifiedasApollo,fromtheHalosdeposit,

Delphi 2637.5 Leadfigurineinaminiatureleadcoffin,fromtheKerameikos

cemetery,Athens 2677.6 PraenestineMirror,fourthcenturyBC,ontheleft,Pan

Lykaios? 2737.7 “HandofSabazius”:ahandwhichcomprisesvariousreligious

symbols 2757.8 InscribedtabletfromBath 2777.9 ReconstructiondrawingoftheTempleofMarsLenuscomplexat

IrminenwingertinTrier,secondcenturyA.D. 2797.10 AltarfromTunis(BardoMuseum)showingAeneasfleeingTroy

withfatherandson 2817.11 TempleofJupiteratBaalbek,withTempleofBacchusinthe

background 2837.12 Alexamenosgraffito.Third-centuryA.D.graffitofromthePalatine

palaceshowingamanworshippingafigurewithanass’sheadonacross 285

7.13 TwosilverplattersfromtheMildenhallTreasure 286

xii listof figures

8.1 HelmetedbustoftheAthenianstatesmanPericles 2998.2 ReconstructionofthesuperstructureoftheMaussolleionat

Halikarnassos 3008.3 MarbleheadoftheyouthfulAlexandertheGreatfromYannitsa

nearPella,ca.300–270B.C. 3068.4 Tetradrachm,Alexandria,Egypt,314B.C.–310B.C.

1944.100.75470,showingtheheadofAlexandertheGreatwithhornofZeusAmmon,cladinelephant’sscalpandaegis;dottedborder 308

8.5 PlanoftheHellenisticcityofAïKhanouminnorthernAfghanistan 312

8.6 Friezewithmusiciansanddancers,first–secondcenturyA.D. 3138.7 MausoleumofAugustus,Rome,ca.28B.C.,actualstate 3178.8 MarbleportraitoftheemperorCaracalla,ca.A.D.217–230 3228.9 NeroportraitinRome’sCapitolineMuseum 3258.10 Veristicportraitofveiledman,mid-firstcenturyB.C. 3268.11 PortraitgroupofTetrarchs,ca.A.D.300,Venice 3278.12 Pantheon,Trajanicstructurecompletedinthereignof

Hadrian;featuringAgrippa’sinscription,M•AGRIPPAL•F•COS•TERTIUM. 329

8.13 Funeraryreliefoffreedpersons,earlyAugustanperiod.Rome 3308.14 ThePantheoninRome,interiorview,erectedin17B.C.,rebuilt

inA.D.110 3348.15 MausoleumofSantaCostanza,Rome,interiorview,ca.A.D.340 3358.16 TheTomboftheScipios 3379.1 DistributionofLateGeometricgravesatArgos 3559.2 Femalefigure(Sterope?)fromtheeastpedimentoftheTempleof

ZeusatOlympia,ca.470–460B.C. 3579.3 Kore675fromtheAthenianacropolis,ca.520–510B.C. 3589.4 MountedprocessionfromthewestfriezeoftheParthenon,

ca.440–430B.C. 3629.5 Augustuswearingatoga 3709.6 MapofcentralItaly 3749.7 DorictempleatCora,traditionallycalledthe“Templeof

Hercules”butmoreplausiblyatempleofJunoMoneta. 3799.8 (a)TheateratPietrabbondante;(b)FigureofAtlas

atPietrabbondante 3819.9 TilefromPietrabbondantewithinscribednamesandfootprints 3839.10 PortraitfromPalmyra 38710.1 Syrianhorsefrontlet,ninthcenturyB.C.,foundatsanctuary

ofHera,Samos 39810.2 Marblestatueofyouth(kouros)foundinsanctuaryofHera,

Samos,ca.560B.C. 40010.3 GreekbronzekraterfoundinCelticgraveatVix,France,

ca.530B.C. 404

listof figures xiii

10.4 Lekythos:BoarHunt,theXenophantosPainter,Athens,SecondhalfofthefourthcenturyB.C. 409

10.5 Bactriancoin(silvertetradrachmofAgathocles,190–180BC) 41110.6 FunerarymonumentofPhilopapposofBesa,MouseionHill,

Athens,A.D.114–116 41310.7 DistributionofRomanamphoraebearingthestampofthepotter

Sestius 42510.8 MapoftheHaddHajarclaustura 42710.9 RomanweaponsfromGraveA4103,Hedegård,Denmark 42911.1 MarbleversionofPolykleitos’DoryphorosfromPompeii

inItaly. 44311.2 Detailofbronzestatue,knownasRiaceBronzeB,foundoffthe

coastofCalabriain1972,mid-fifthcenturyB.C. 44511.3 BronzehermsignedbyApolloniosfromtheVillaofthePapyriin

Herculaneum,Italy 44711.4 ModeloftheoriginalAthena Parthenos 44911.5 MarbleversionofMyron’sfifth-centuryDiscobolos,fromthe

EsquilineHillinRome 45111.6 Gravestele,thirdquarterofthefourthcenturyB.C.,foundnear

theKerameikosinAthensin1840 45311.7 TheIlissosstele,ca.340B.C.,foundintheIlissosRiver 45411.8 MarbleheadofHadrianfromtheRomanBathsatSagalassos,

AsiaMinor,ca.A.D.120 45511.9 StatueofHadrianasMarsfromFrosinoneItaly,ca.A.D.118 45611.10 MarblefootfromthestatueofHadrianintheRomanBaths,

Sagalassos,AsiaMinor,ca.A.D.120 45711.11 StatueofNeroasaboy,fromtheRomanbasilicaatVelleia,Italy,

A.D.50 46111.12 MarblereliefofwomensellingfoodfromOstia,Italy,second

centuryA.D. 46211.13 Whitelimestonegravestele,Palmyra,A.D.170–190 46511.14 MarcQuinn,Siren,partoftheBritishMuseumStatuephilia

exhibition 46911.15 MarblestatueofanakedAphroditecrouchingatherbathdisplayed

alongsideMarcQuinn’sSiren.Roman,secondcenturyA.D. 47011.16 Laocoon(post-1957reconstruction) 47211.17 a)MarbleScyllagroupfromSperlonga;b)Detailofthe

Athenodoros,AgesandrosandPolydorossignatureontheoriginalmarblesculpturegroup 476

11.18 WallpaintingoftheinfantHerculeskillingthesnakessentbyJuno,fromtheHouseoftheVettiiatPompeii 477

11.19 “NewYorkKouros” 47911.20 Diagramshowingthe“evolution”oftheGreekkourosduringthe

sixthcenturyB.C. 48111.21 New YorkerCartoon“DanielAlaindrawing” 483

xiv listof figures

11.22 Atticred-figurepsykter:(a)wholevase;(b)detail;(c)detail 48611.23 (a)Tyrannicides,ImperialRomanmarblecopy(fromHadrian’s

villaatTivoli)ofabronzegroupattributedtoKritiosandNesiotes;(b)Detailshowingthesamesculpturalmotif,emblazonedonamarblethronefromtheTheatreofDionysosinAthens,fourthcenturyB.C. 489

11.24 InteriortondoofanAtticred-figurekylixattributedtoOnesimos,ca.490B.C. 491

Susan E. Alcock is Director of the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Clas-sics and Anthropology at Brown University. Her research interests include the Hellenistic and Roman Eastern Mediterranean, landscape archaeology, and archae-ologies of memory and imperialism. She has been involved with several regional archaeological projects in Greece and Armenia, and is currently co-directing field-work in and near the major site of Petra, southern Jordan.

Bettina Bergmann is Helene Philips Herzig ’49 Professor of Art at Mount Holyoke College. Her research concerns the Roman art of landscape, domestic space, and the reception and reconstruction of ancient houses and villas.

John F. Cherry is Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology in the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University, where he is also Professor of Classics and Anthropology. He is an Aegean prehistorian, whose current research interests include the archaeology of islands, landscape archaeology, lithic analysis, and reception studies of Alexander the Great. His fieldwork has mainly involved archaeological surveys in Greece, Italy, and Armenia, and he is currently co-directing a project on Montserrat in the West Indies.

Penelope J. E. Davies is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History, College of Fine Arts, University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the roles of state art and architecture in the political life of Rome during the Republic and the Empire.

Jack L. Davis is Carl W. Blegen Professor of Greek Archaeology at the University of Cincinnati and Director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. His research interests include landscape archaeology, Greek prehistory, and the rural history of Ottoman and Venetian Greece. He has directed or co-directed several regional archaeological projects in Greece and Albania, has excavated a

Notes on Contributors

xvi notesoncontributors

Greek temple at Apollonia and is currently studying unpublished finds from the Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Greece.

Hamish Forbes is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at Nottingham University. His main research interests lie in the study of recent and modern Mediterranean land-scapes and their communities and how they impact on our understanding of the archaeological and historical records.

Lin Foxhall, Professor of Greek Archaeology and History in the School of Archae-ology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, was educated at Bryn Mawr College, University of Pennsylvania and the University of Liverpool. She has also held posts at Oxford University and University College London. She has published extensively on gender in classical antiquity, as well as on agriculture and the ancient economy.

Jonathan M. Hall is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History and Classics at the University of Chicago. His research interests include ethnic and cultural identities in Greek antiquity, issues of historical method in Greek protohistory, and the relationship between history and archaeology.

Tonio Hölscher is Professor emeritus of Classical Archaeology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. His main research field is Greek and Roman figurative art in political, social and religious contexts; this embraces studies of urbanism as well as aesthetic theory. His current research projects include political monuments in the ancient world and the use of images in social practice.

Henry Hurst is Reader in Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. His main research interest is urban archaeology and he is currently involved with publishing work on the Santa Maria Antiqua complex in Rome. He also continues to be involved in the archaeology of Carthage and Roman Britain, where he worked previously.

Martin Jones is George Pitt-Rivers Professor of Archaeological Science at the University of Cambridge. His field of interest is bio-archaeology and the spread and development of agricultural practices and crops.

Martin Millett is Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge Uni-versity and a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College. His principal interests are in the social and economic archaeology of the Roman empire. He has run field surveys and excavations in Britain, Spain, Portugal and Italy.

Sarah P. Morris is a classicist and archaeologist in the Department of Classics and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, where she was named the Stein-metz Professor of Classical Archaeology and Material Culture in 2001. Her teaching and research interests include early Greek literature (Homer, Hesiod, and Herodo-tus), Greek religion, prehistoric and early Greek archaeology, especially, ceramics, architecture and landscape studies, and Near Eastern influence on Greek art and culture. She has excavated in Israel, Turkey, Greece, and Albania.

notesoncontributors xvii

Lisa Nevett is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research involves using interdisciplinary approaches to the built environment as a way of addressing large-scale questions about Greek and Roman society.

Robin Osborne is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge. He has published widely on topics in Greek archaeology, art, and history, including Classical Landscape with Figures (London, 1987), Greece in the Making, c. 1200–479 B.C. (London, 1996) and Archaic and Classical Greek Art (Oxford, 1998), Athens and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge, 2010) and The History Written on the Classical Greek Body (Cambridge 2011).

Nicholas Purcell is Camden Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford. He works on ancient social, economic and cultural history and is also interested in the history of the Mediterranean over the longer term.

Christopher Smith is Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews and is currently Director of the British School at Rome. His research interests include early Rome, ancient religion and ancient rhetoric and historiography. He has recently completed a book on the Roman gens.

Anthony Snodgrass was Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at the Uni-versity of Cambridge from 1976 to 2001. He has worked for many years primarily on the archaeology and history of pre-Classical Greece, more recently also on the intellectual and disciplinary background of Classical Archaeology. He has a long-standing involvement in intensive field survey in Greece.

Michael Squire is Lecturer in Classical Greek Art at King’s College, London. His research deals with all aspects of Graeco-Roman visual culture, as well as its abiding western influence: this is reflected in his two most recent books, concerned with Graeco-Roman representations of the body on the one hand, and the so-called “Iliac tablets” on the other.

Nicola Terrenato is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Michi-gan at Ann Arbor. He directs the Gabii project and has conducted extensive field-work in and around Rome and in Northern Etruria. His research interests include Roman imperialism and colonialism, field survey methods and early Roman landscapes.

Caroline Vout is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ’s College. She has published widely on topics in Roman history and Latin literature, Greek and Roman art and its reception and, in 2006, curated the international exhibition of ancient sculpture, Antinous: the Face of the Antique, at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. In 2009, she was awarded a Philip Lever-hulme Prize for her work on ancient visual culture.

Andrew Wallace-Hadrill is Director of the British School at Rome and Professor of Classics at the University of Reading. His work lies in the area of Roman social and cultural history, from imperial ideology to domestic space. He is involved in

xviii notesoncontributors

various projects in Italy, and directs a project of conservation and research at Herculaneum.

Jane Webster is Lecturer in Historical Archaeology at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), where she teaches and researches on colonial archaeology in both the Roman and early modern periods. A former Caird Senior Research Fellow at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, she is currently working on a study of the material culture of slave shipping.

Why Classical Archaeology?

Unlike “Mesoamerican Archaeology,” “North American Archaeology” or “The Archaeology of Mediterranean Prehistory,” “Classical Archaeology” is a title with strong, and not entirely positive, connotations. The title “classical” carries with it a claimed value judgment that is quite absent from the geographical or period titles of other volumes in this series. In fact, the “classical” of “classical archaeology” does not directly apply to the archaeology—“classical archaeology” is not the archaeology of material that has acquired “classic” status. It applies rather to the “Classical World,” that is, the world that has left us the literature that has acquired “classic” status in western civilization. This is the world inhabited by Greeks and Romans between the eighth century B.C. and the fourth century A.D. “classical archaeol-ogy” is the archaeology of that world.

It is not difficult to envisage an archaeological guide that treated Greece with its Near Eastern neighbors or one that subsumed imperial Rome into the early Chris-tian world. Our decision to treat Greek and Roman civilization as a single “classical” whole is traditional but it is neither innocent nor inconsequential. It is a decision that both reflects and perpetuates the claims that have been made by Europeans and their descendants repeatedly since the Renaissance for the unique status of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. The intellectual understanding of the world and how to live in the world, and the literary expression of that understanding achieved in Greece and Rome, have been hailed as the necessary basis for civilized life. It has been the spreading of this “classical” understanding of the world which, along with the spreading of Christianity, has underpinned, and served to justify western

Classical Archaeology, Second Edition. Edited by Susan E. Alcock and Robin Osborne. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Introduction

Robin Osborne and Susan E. Alcock

2 robinosborneandsusane.alcock

imperialism. The imperialism of our own day, with its stress on democracy, contin-ues to draw a significant amount of its power from the claim that democracy was invented by the ancient Greeks.

Why, then, have we persisted with the title “Classical Archaeology” rather than using, for example, “The Archaeology of the Iron Age Mediterranean”? Precisely because it is important to acknowledge that the archaeology of the Greek and Roman worlds has a history. All scholarship builds upon the work of previous scholars in the field: not for nothing do doctoral theses regularly begin with a “survey of past literature.” Yet in the archaeology of the Greek world and the archaeology of the Roman world that past literature carries a burden that extends beyond the particular substantive discoveries and insights that it records. The mate-rial culture of Greece and Rome has been uniquely freighted with moral value, and has come to play an ongoing role in the formation of western sensibilities. It is simply not possible to revisit the material world of the Greeks and the Romans as a disinterested observer: whether we as westerners like it or not, this material has been privileged in our own formation, and it has been privileged as our past. The archaeology of Greece and Rome has been given a role in our intellectual formation which is not rivaled by the archaeology of Celts, Germans, Iberians or Gauls—even for inhabitants of Britain, Germany, Spain and France. The more we find the impe-rialism of the “classical world” a political and moral embarrassment, the more vital it is to understand it and the basis for it.

What Sort of Classical Archaeology?

If the choice of “Classical Archaeology” in the title is a traditional and thereby conservative one, the organization and contents of this volume are far from tradi-tional. The organization reflects an acknowledgment that the unity implicitly claimed for the Greek and Roman worlds and for the whole of a period of more than a thousand years by subsuming it as classical archaeology obscures important differ-ences. Each of the topics discussed in the book (except the natural environment) is discussed from two angles, broadly Greek and Roman. This division is in part a chronological one: the focus of Greek archaeology has been the period from ca. 700 to ca. 100 B.C., the focus of Roman archaeology the period from ca. 200 B.C. to ca. A.D. 500. (The period 323–30 B.C., known as the “Hellenistic” period, is variously discussed in “Greek” or “Roman” sections, as appropriate to each topic.) In part, however, the division is geographical: the focus of Greek archaeology lies in the Greek peninsula and the eastern Mediterranean, the focus of Roman archae-ology in the Italian peninsula and in western Europe. Since the political history of western Europe and of the eastern Mediterranean has been very different over the past millennium, that geographical difference has resulted in the ongoing use of the classical heritage being very different, and political differences continue to affect the conditions in which archaeology can be carried out today. By exploring our chosen themes from both Greek and Roman angles we hope to alert the reader not simply to the different material available for discussion in the later Roman west from that available from the earlier Greek east, but also to the ways in which that

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different inheritance affects the approaches which archaeologists take, the questions that they ask, and the answers with which they are satisfied.

The themes which we have chosen to explore also mark this volume out as break-ing with tradition. Classical archaeology, as Snodgrass explains in his contribution to chapter 1, has been “a discipline devoted to the archaeology of objects,” “gov-erned and organized . . . by classes of material.” A guide to classical archaeology might therefore be expected to be itself organized by classes of material—pottery, metalwork, sculpture, architecture. Many well-established introductions to periods or regions within classical archaeology are organized in that way. R. G. Collingwood and I. A. Richmond’s The Archaeology of Roman Britain, a revision published in 1969 of a book first published in 1930, starts with roads, goes on through military camps, forts, and frontier works to towns, villas, temples, and tombs, and ends up with inscriptions, coins, fine and coarse pottery, brooches and weapons. William Biers’s Introduction to Greek Archaeology (1996) divides itself by period, but within the periods discussion proceeds by artifact type; Nicolas Coldstream’s Geometric Greece (1977) organizes itself by period and region but within the region by artifact type. And the same would be true of many period-specific guides. Even the recent German collection Klassische Archäologie: eine Einführung, edited by Borbein, Höls-cher, and Zanker (Borbein et al. 2000) includes a section with separate chapters on towns, architecture, sanctuaries, and graves.

This volume is not organized by classes of material. This is partly a practical matter. It is indeed hard to see how any guide to classical archaeology within the space of a single volume could offer any helpful introduction to the rich, various, and swiftly changing types and styles of artifact produced and used in the Greek and Roman worlds over this millennium. It is partly a matter of what can be done on the printed page and what can be done only in the field or the museum. A short amount of time handling artifacts or seeing on the ground the traces of ancient buildings and settlements introduces one to material much more efficiently than much time spent with the printed page—or in a lecture room. But it is also a matter of what archaeology is about.

What we know about classical archaeology has come about through people’s curiosity about objects which have survived from antiquity or been discovered, whether by chance or by planned excavation. It is because people have wanted to know “What is this?” that we are able to date artifacts and interpret sites. There is still a lot that we do not know about particular artifacts and classes of artifact from the Greek and Roman world, and there are still occasional sites which those who excavate them find it hard to classify. But in general our knowledge of the material culture of the Greek and Roman worlds is now so firmly based that we can readily answer the question of what an object, an assemblage, or a site is. The hard ques-tions which classical archaeology still has to face up to are questions about how objects relate to each other and above all to people. What patterns of human behav-ior are indicated by the artifacts, assemblages, and sites available for study? How can we convert collections of grave goods, or dumps of votives, or the buildings of a civic center into witnesses to the social, religious, and political life of Greek and Roman communities? When we find an object made in one place being deposited in a different place, can we reconstruct the reasons why and means by which it

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traveled? What does the spread of an artistic motif, or a fashion for building in a particular type of stone, tell us about the interactions of communities within and across political boundaries?

Studying classical archaeology by studying and specializing in particular types of material does not merely fail to address and to answer these interpretative questions. It frequently also assumes answers to these questions, answers that are drawn not from any feature of the artifacts themselves but from the modern world. Classical archaeologists have often been shy of, and resistant to, archaeological theory. Theory has been held to be unconnected to the real concerns of the archaeologist in the field, and to dress itself up in impenetrable jargon. But “theory” is not an optional extra for the archaeologist, since all who attempt to say anything about objects which survive from antiquity do so on the basis of a body of assumptions. Archaeo-logical theory is about making the assumptions explicit, whether those assumptions are assumptions about how an object came to be in the place where it was found, about whether it is or is not “typical,” or whether those assumptions are about the sorts of connections one object may have with another, either in terms of their origin or in terms of their “biography.” The more different the society being studied archaeologically is from our own society, the more essential is the clear articulation of assumptions, and the more essential is archaeological theory.

This book explores classical archaeology as a discipline that is concerned with the interpretation of the material culture of classical antiquity. It is concerned with the sorts of artifacts which, because of their intrinsic merits and because of their influence on western civilization since the Renaissance, attract discussion in their own right. But it is also concerned with the sort of artifacts whose banality and lack of aesthetic merit mean that no one would spend time on them in their own right. So, it is concerned with works of art—sculptures, buildings, and paintings—but it is also concerned with broken shards of coarse pottery, the stone beds of oil and wine presses, lumps of slag from mining and metalworking, and so on. It is the mix of such items in the archaeological record that enables us to recre-ate some picture of the nature of Greek and Roman communities, their values, their way of life, and their expectations. It is only on the basis of such an understanding that we can come to comprehend how classical Athens sustained a democratic constitution in which all Athenian adult males could participate in political decision-making, or how the Romans conquered the Mediterranean between the end of the third century B.C. and the beginning of the first century A.D. It is only by such an understanding that we can come to comprehend also those literary, philosophical, and artistic developments which have been so fundamental to the subsequent self-understanding of the West.

The Archaeology of an Alien World

There is no doubt that in many respects the Greeks and Romans were remarkably like us. The very status of classical literature in modern western education has ensured that in important ways we share the same heritage and moral, social, and

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political expectations with the classical world. The extent to which the agenda of western philosophy was set by Plato is a mark of the degree to which modern western puzzles about the world run along much the same lines as ancient Greek puzzles about the world. But it is equally the case that Greeks and Romans were in other respects quite unlike us. The polytheism which they shared was based on expecta-tions about the natural world and about the moral order of the world which are quite foreign to a civilization built on the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The economic base of the western world was transformed by the invention of a mechanical substitute for human and animal labor which brought about the Industrial Revolution; that revo-lution utterly changed production per man-day, not simply in the manufacture of artifacts but in agriculture also. Rapid and reliable communications over long dis-tances, such as only became regular in the 20th century, radically alter the nature of relationships between individuals and communities far separated in space.

No scholar studying the Greek and Roman world is ignorant of such differences, but it is nevertheless hard to keep assumptions born in the modern world out of interpretations of ancient material unless attention is directly and explicitly focused on questions of interpretation. Fully to realize the importance of this, consider the following examples, one socio-economic and one socio-political.

In the modern world most goods move through trade. Most of what most people own in the western world today was purchased by them for money. Some will have been bought direct from the producer, but most will have been bought from a mid-dleman, a retailer. Few who buy from them have any personal knowledge of the retailer or manufacturer involved. A small number of items owned by individuals today will have been given to them, either by the person who made them or by someone who bought them, whether from their producer or from a middleman. For some periods of classical antiquity we believe the situation to have been very different all over the Greek and Roman world, and for other periods to have been very different in at least some areas of those worlds. In those periods and places, most of the, generally much smaller, number of items owned by someone would have been acquired other than by money purchase. They would be gifts or acquired in exchange for goods or services. Even where objects were money purchases, the purchaser will generally have known, and have been known to, the seller. Interpret-ing objects, particularly objects found distant from their place of manufacture, depends crucially on what we think to have been the dominant nature of exchange in the world in which they were produced and used.

The expectation that pots or everyday goods will have been traded for money comes naturally to us since we ourselves expect to purchase equivalent items, but there are plenty of past societies in which it has been gifts or bartering which have dominated the exchange of goods. The challenge to the archaeologist is to detect features of the material record which may offer clues as to the exchange relationship in question. In looking for these clues, it is not facts about the object itself, the technique by which it was produced, the ascription to a particular manufacturer or absolute date, which are likely to be most important, but rather the nature of the context in which the item was found, what other objects it was found with, whether other similar objects are rare or abundant in the vicinity of the find-spot, what the

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pattern of distribution of this particular object is, and so on. Of course, classifying the object accurately and precisely is vital, but it is a preliminary to the major task of interpretation, not a substitute for such interpretation.

If the dissemination of goods was often by quite different means in Greek and Roman antiquity, the dissemination of verbal and visual information was almost always by different means. For hundreds of years now the West has been used to the possibility of mass reproduction of texts and images. “The Gutenberg Revolu-tion” made it possible to put the same written text into the hands of thousands of people over a wide area in a short space of time. Today’s instant beaming of words and images across the world has taken this revolutionary development several steps further on, but the significance of the invention of the very possibility of mass reproduction of the same text or image was fundamental.

In the Greek and Roman worlds there were simply no ways to reproduce exten-sive texts or images. There was indeed essentially only one way of mass reproducing any text or image, and that was through coinage. Stamping the same image and brief text on coins was the only way of getting a written message or particular image into the hands of significant numbers of people with any rapidity. And disseminating coins was a state monopoly.

The impossibility of getting the same written text to any significant number of people has all sorts of consequences. It has political consequences. Government decisions cannot be put into the hands of those who are affected by them as written texts. People have to be encouraged to come to the texts instead. Hence, for example, the Athenians made the statues in the Agora of the ten heroes after whom their tribes were named the place where public notices were put up. But there are cultural consequences too. A song that catches on in Rome cannot be dispatched to the other cities of the empire except by sending out people who will sing it. Cultural fashions can only sweep across the Mediterranean through individuals traveling and passing on their enthusiasms. And although scholars sometimes talk about “school texts” in antiquity, the labor of copying texts meant that there was no way that every pupil in the Roman empire could ever have the same text in his hands to learn from. The reach of the state was severely restricted by the absence of the technology for textual reproduction, and in these circumstances regional variation was bound to thrive.

The consequences of not being able to disseminate images is, however, even more important. Texts could, after all, be spread in oral form. The six thousand Athenian citizens at a meeting of the Athenian Assembly only had to talk to ten others on their way home and the whole citizen body would have the news of what had been decided. But there was no oral way of conveying a visual image. Those who caught sight of Boudicca, the queen of the tribe known as the Iceni who led a rebellion against the Romans in 60 A.D., could convey her striking appearance only in words (“long auburn hair down to her hips and a large golden torque,” according to the much later Roman writer Dio Cassius [62.2.4]). Most inhabitants of the Roman empire would never know what the consuls for any particular year looked like, and beyond the local community the only person with whose image

introduction 7

they would be familiar, precisely because it was reproduced on coinage, was the emperor.

The difficulties of conveying visual images directly impacted on their power. Rather than a world in which people expect to recognize anyone of any public prominence because they will have seen their picture, the classical world was one where names normally carried no image with them, and where it was recognizing a person, not failing to recognize a person, that was shocking. The impact of recognition added to the power of the individual. It did so not least because the widespread adoption of the same “types” for images of the gods meant that one of the few sets of images that were widely recognizable were images of the gods.

Yet if the power of the image reflected back on the individual whose image it was, it reflected also on the individual who made the image. The fantasy of the artist who carves a statue that comes to life, most famously exemplified by the myth of Pygmalion, reflects upon the ability of the artist to “bring to life” distant figures who would otherwise simply be names. And once more, this ability to overcome distance applied not simply to making recognizable persons who were physically distant but also to making recognizable those who were metaphysically distant— the gods.

Classical archaeology distinguishes itself in part as the archaeology of societies rich in texts. Yet whereas most texts in the modern world are best treated as having no particular objective status, the texts of the ancient world are all importantly not only objects, but individual objects in their own right, neither mass produced nor identical. The scholar in the famed library at Alexandria, in which the first Ptolemies attempted to make a systematic collection of Greek literature, might be able to emulate the modern student, able to access a world of written data without inter-acting with any other human being. But for all but the extremely few such scholars, acquiring information and learning about literature meant talking to others and committing to memory literary and dramatic performances that they had heard.

The invention of the “art of memory” was attributed in antiquity to the fifth-century poet Simonides, from the island of Keos. In its classic form the art of memory involved “placing” what had to be remembered, for instance, the different parts of a speech, onto a familiar building, so that they could be retrieved by calling to mind the building and recalling what was in each doorway, window, niche, or whatever. Studies of memory have shown that it is precisely those things which simultaneously evoke multiple senses (color, feel, sound) that are most clearly and vividly recalled. The absence of ready ways of recalling the appearance of persons or objects once seen but now no longer in view arguably ensured that visual appear-ances made a particularly striking impact, and hence made it entirely appropriate to “hang” texts upon a visual framework.

The archaeological consequences of the differences between classical and modern dissemination of goods and of texts and images are profound. In both cases the differences mean that very much more was invested in objects in the classical world. Objects that were exchanged had an important life, what Appadurai has called “the social life of things” (Appadurai 1986). Texts and images too carried rich material

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associations. In all cases, the particular object mattered. Context was all-important for ancient producers and consumers, and context has to be to the fore when we study what it was that they produced and consumed.

How This Guide to Classical Archaeology is Organized

In this book we attempt to provide readers with what they need to know in order to understand the material culture of classical antiquity. Readers will not come away from this book able to put a date on a piece of classical sculpture, identify the hand of the painter responsible for the scenes painted on a vessel of fine Athenian pottery, able to distinguish “real” Arretine pottery from imitations made in Gaul or Britain, or ascribe a marching camp to the campaigns of a particular Roman emperor. The classical archaeologists whom this book aims to create will be classical archaeolo-gists with a number of distinctive traits. First and foremost, they will use texts along with material archaeology, offering both a context for archaeology and an indication of areas of material culture ideologically understated or repressed. They will be aware of the tradition within which all classical archaeologists operate and write, and will understand the sorts of archaeological fieldwork which are and have been possible in classical lands, and the constraints which have determined and still determine what can and cannot be done in the field. They will see the physical environment not in terms of unchangeable conditions which Greeks and Romans had to endure, but in terms of a dynamic ecological relationship which patient fieldwork and judicious use of ethnography enable us to understand. Their picture of how that environment was inhabited, whether in rural settlements or towns, and of the quality and dominant concerns of country and civic life will draw on sociol-ogy and the importance of representation, as well as upon dots on the map. They will be conscious of the range of particular ways in which individuals related to each other directly, both in the household and in public life, secular and sacred, and indirectly through the exchange of goods, and of the ways in which they pre-sented themselves to others and represented others to themselves. And we hope that, in consequence, they will reflect upon the ways in which they themselves engage with, and are encouraged by the ways in which the media present the classical world to engage with, this particular past, and on the oscillation between idealist and realist visions of classical antiquity which mark all studies, scholarly and popular.

We open with “What is Classical Archaeology?,” two discussions of the way in which classical archaeology has been practiced, and of its scope and range. These studies focus upon the subject as a whole, as manifested above all in what is pub-lished. They are complemented by “Doing Archaeology in the Classical Lands,” two studies of what it is to practice classical archaeology in the field, studies which reveal the ways in which the vagaries of real life, including international politics, impinge upon the field archaeologist, but which also reflect something of the excite-ment that accompanies the exploration not just of new sites or countrysides but of new archaeological methods.

introduction 9

The nature of the countrysides that have been increasingly the focus of classical archaeologists’ concerns over the past quarter century is further explored in the following studies. The first of these, “Human Ecology and the Classical Landscape,” concerns the reconstruction of both the natural and the agricultural environment, the uncovering of the physical conditions within which life was lived, and because it is the natural world that is at issue, Greek and Roman worlds are discussed together. The following pair, “The Essential Countryside,” concern what was made of the countryside—the ways it was exploited and settled and the forms of social life betrayed by its monuments.

The two chapters that follow turn respectively from countryside to city (“Urban Spaces and Central Places”), and from the interaction of households to interactions within the household (“Housing and Households”). Urban life came to have particularly characteristic forms in classical antiquity, with highly developed com-munities devoting extensive resources to public facilities both for secular purposes of mutual defense and self-government (meeting places, offices for magistrates, law courts) and for the worship of the gods. Greek and Roman patterns of urban life, and in particular the importance attached to central places, emerge as highly dis-tinctive. Public life, and in particular secular civic life, was throughout antiquity dominated by men, and it is to the household that attention must be turned if we are to understand the place and condition of women. The rich evidence of surviving domestic housing has only recently begun to be intensively investigated, and to reveal a much less uniform set of living practices than classical literary texts had led scholars to expect.

The religious side of civic life and the personal side of civic politics are investi-gated in the next two chapters, “Cult and Ritual” and “The Personal and the Political.” The most distinguished examples of classical architecture belong to reli-gious buildings, but these have been more regularly analyzed as buildings than inserted into their religious context. Similarly, commemorative statuary, whether honoring the living or the dead, has been regularly inserted into the history of sculp-ture rather than seen as part of the political self-presentation of those who had or aspired to power. These two chapters take these familiar classes of evidence and show the ways in which they look different when seen as parts of a functioning system.

The following pair of chapters look at how the communities which have been examined individually or as types in early parts of the book interacted with each other. The two studies in “The Creation and Expression of Identity” explore the ways in which whole communities projected particular identities, signaling to others the values which they held to be particular to them. The two further studies in “Linking with a Wider World” look at how such signaling was received and what was reflected back, as they look at the exchange of representations that went with the exchange of goods, and explore the ways in which the classical world as we know it was constituted by this exchange of goods and ideas.

The final substantive chapter takes one particular type of object discussed in a number of the earlier chapters and asks questions of them, not about what sort of relations they facilitated between individuals or groups, but about how they change each other. The objects in question are objects that have traditionally been the focus

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of interest for those writing on the history of art, and the chapter makes clear the ways in which an art-historical approach can enrich the archaeologist’s and the historian’s understanding of the material culture of classical archaeology.

In “Prospective,” a reflective conclusion to the volume, we encourage readers to engage both with the construction of the classical world which they are offered by film, newsprint, and popular books and on the construction which they have been offered in this volume.

REFERENCES

Appadurai, Arjun 1986 The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Biers, William R. 1996 The Archaeology of Greece: An Introduction. 2nd edition. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Borbein, Adolph H., Tonio Hölscher, and Paul Zanker, eds. 2000 Klassische Archäologie: eine Einführung. Berlin: Reimer Verlag.

Coldstream, J. Nicolas 1977 Geometric Greece. London: Benn.Collingwood, R. G., and I. A. Richmond 1969 The Archaeology of Roman Britain. London:

Methuen.